The Black Revolution on Campus by Martha Biondi (review)

The Black Revolution on Campus is a combination of black activist history and intellectual history that fills a historical void involving black students and the black freedom struggle of the late 1960s. As part of the black power movement, the black student movement transformed American higher education, permanently changing white campuses, the academic community, and college curricula. But this aspect of the black freedom struggle and its connection to the wider civil rights narrative has garnered very little attention or historical space, and this is where The Black Revolution on Campus by historian Martha Biondi makes a significant scholarly contribution to civil rights history. The book details the complex dynamics of the black student movement and its most important victories.

The Black Revolution on Campus documents the campus struggles of black students and the connection of this struggle to the overall black freedom struggle. As described by Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus rounds out the civil rights narrative of reform that began with Brown v. Board of Education. As an extension of Brown, the black student movement pressured institutions of higher education to open admissions and place greater emphasis on African American university attendance and graduation rates. This emphasis on access to higher education conceptually linked education, opportunity, and mobility, which not only contributed to the expansion of the black middle class but also opened opportunities for other marginalized groups with long histories of discrimination. By opening up the collegiate and intellectual life of American culture, the black student movement gave impetus to demands from Latinos, Asian Americans, and female students on campus.

Also, within the context of black political thought, specifically black radicalism, the black student movement was galvanized by black nationalism, which redefined black American identity and compelled American colleges to accommodate black cultural interests. However, it was also a black nationalism that was anti-imperialist and internationalist, connecting with global struggles against colonialism and sometimes articulated as Third Worldism and Pan-Africanism.

Another dynamic of The Black Revolution on Campus was that it reinforced the dialectic of reform and repression. Biondi documents the overwhelming state violence used against black students. As targets of police surveillance and infiltration, arrests and trials, police violence and shooting deaths, black lives were expendable. However, these repressive tactics also helped to catalyze, shape, and inspire the black student movement and campus struggles. Such tactics also profoundly altered the lives of many black student activists in very personal ways. Some left political activism behind; for others, this was the beginning of a lifetime of activism, public service, and political and legal advocacy.

Biondi also highlights the black student struggle on historically black college campuses. According to Biondi, the student movement on black campuses focused on three main goals: “to increase black consciousness, upgrade academics and improve the physical plant, and finally, expand student participation in governance” (142). Howard University, Voorhees College in South Carolina, North Carolina A & T State University, Jackson State College in Mississippi, Atlanta University, and Southern University in Louisiana are discussed as important bases for the student movement and also as unheralded, forgotten, and excluded from scholarship.

The last third of The Black Revolution on Campus is devoted to a discussion of African American studies in the academy and according to Biondi: “Students demanded it; on many campuses they helped to create it, and they rightly deserve credit for its beginnings” (275). However, the story is complicated because the character and mission of black studies programs shifted as a consequence of campus politics and changes in student perspective and fervor. What began as a call for broad social transformation with revolutionary potential and black community empowerment instead became a narrower intellectual and academic transformation controlled by administrators and professors. Although initially black studies programs had difficulty attracting academic talent and achieving institutional legitimacy, these programs have put race as well as “gender, class, sexuality, and ethnicity at the center of intellectual analysis across disciplines” (277).

Biondi clearly demonstrates that African...